Voice Over (Gene): "1999 was the year the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control..."
Claire Tourneur and her dream of flying/falling; the orbital images are (could be) from Claire's dream.
Claire waking up in strange places. (Music: "Sax and Violins")
Claire drives from Venice toward Paris. The car computer ("Hello... CLAIRE"). Respect The Speed Limit. (Music: "Summer Kisses")
"You are leaving the Map Zone Database." -- Claire takes a turn that will change her life.
Car crash: Chico and Raymond. At the inn: Chico and Raymond hand the Nice airport loot (with an electronic tracer) off to Claire.
Claire in Lyons (note man wearing LCD sandwich-board sign). Claire meets Sam ("Trevor McPhee"). "You have sad eyes." Claire meets Bert the bounty hunter, who is tracking Sam.
Leaving Lyons: encounter with French highway patrol. "Honeymoon." Recording of pygmy children singing. Sam: "My mother recorded that."
Paris: Sam identified as Trevor McPhee. Claire and Sam/Trevor split up. Claire returns to Gene, who is fitfully at work on his new novel. (Music: "Fretless")
Claire doffs her black wig. "I'm rich now." But she discovers that Sam/Trevor robbed her. Gene says not to worry about "having stolen money stolen."
Paris: Claire meets Bert the bounty hunter again. Using redial button on public phone, she contacts Winter, proprietor of "Missing Persons Gmbh," Berlin. Claire decides to track Sam/Trevor to Mangerstrasse 266.
Berlin: Claire finds Sam at his aunt's town house, making movies with a strange, head-mounted camera. Sam sets up a meeting but doesn't show.
Claire and Winter: computerized tracking programs. The story of the stolen opal from South Australia. $85,000 bounty on the head of Trevor McPhee. "Trevor" (Sam) headed to Lisbon.
Lisbon: Claire and Sam meet while Winter spies on them. "Every time you use your credit card, bells start ringing." Sam produces the stolen opal (which changes hands 3 or 4 times). Claire and Sam elude Winter (Music: "Calling All Angels").
Claire and Sam in bed (undressing around handcuffs). Winter breaks in but has no stomach for violence ("I hate guns"). Sam ditches Winter and Claire.
Lisbon, next day (Music: "Summer Kisses," reprise). Claire's ATM card fails. Winter offers her passage to Moscow. Voice in background: "I don't know why I came here. I just took a flight."
Claire calls Gene from the plane, en route to Moscow. Chico has showed up in Paris.
Moscow: Gene arrives at the Ukraina Hotel. No rooms available: 1500 rubles for the couch. Winter's "fishing program" fails, since it is inferior "Eastern Bloc" design. Winter covets something using "advanced Vietnamese chips."
In the office of a Moscow detective, who has Vietnamese chips and a better tracking program -- "The Bounty Bear." "I'm searching... Give me a minute... I'm identifying... I've got him... This is your guy." $500,000 bounty on the head of Sam Farber, who is wanted for industrial espionage.
Gene buys software and hardware for the tracking program from the Russian private eye. (Music: Elvis Costello, "Days")
Claire meets up with Bert again. He feeds her a truth-drug, she slips him sleeping pills. More back-story on Sam: theft of camera from Sunset Labs in Palo Alto. Claire is anxious about Gene: "He's innocent. And I am really blonde."
Fax image of Sam and the camera unfolds from Bert's coat pocket.
Claire discovers Sam is on Trans-Siberian Express to Beijing; she decamps while Gene is asleep. "I still love you. Broken ladder."
On the Trans-Siberian Express (Music: "The Adversary"). Sam gives Claire the slip at Sung Li Station. Three days till the next train, so Claire hitches a ride to Beijing.
She sends Gene videofax of the trip. "I'm lost." Gene tells Claire that Sam has gone to Tokyo. They arrange to meet there.
Tokyo, at coffin hotel. Claire invades the gents-only quarters. Goofy escapades. Sam discovered bound and gagged in sleeping cubicle. Winter and agents appear. Gunshots. Claire slips down fire escape to Pachinko parlor, where she finds Sam.
Claire: "Do you know who I am?"
Sam: "You're the angel from Lisbon."
Gene and Winter: "Are you still playing detective, or are you just a busboy?" Winter proposes to head for Coober Pedy, South Australia.
Claire brings Sam to a ryokan in the mountains of Japan, where his eyes are treated by Mr. Mori, an herbalist. Mr. Mori: "The eye does not see the same as the heart."
Claire finds the camera: "I know you stole it." Sam confesses. He is the son of Dr. Henry Farber, who invented the camera, but who originally ran off with it to keep it away from the U.S. government. "That camera takes pictures that blind people can see." Plan to collect images for Sam's mother, who is blind.
"Have you ever been to San Francisco?" By ship to California.
Shipboard: Claire uses the camera. "It records the biochemical event of seeing." "It hurts like hell. No wonder you were almost blind."
San Francisco. Claire and Sam try to buy a very old car (a 1973 Pontiac coupe). "No one wants cash." The used-car salesman rips them off. (Music: "Humans from Earth").
On TV, background: documentary on the Indian satellite crisis. U.S. proposes to shoot the satellite down, but there is concern that this will trigger "chain reaction" from defensive satellites. Announcer says cheerily: "Just watch for the flash in the sky."
Chico arrives in a low rider. "Plastic America!"
Recording Sam's sister. "My mother will see my face!"
Claire and Sam transfer to Korean freighter bound for Sydney. Winter and Gene arrive in Coober Pedy (Music: Lou Reed, "What's Good?").
Coober Pedy. Gene and Sam have a dust-up, get tossed in the can by the local constabulary.
Bert collars Claire, feeds her truth drug again. Only Bert ne parle pas francais, so he isn't able to understand the truth. Chico rescues Claire from Bert. David, Sam's aboriginal friend, takes the camera away.
Gene and Claire -- "broken ladder" again. Gene: "Do you love him?" Claire: "Yes I do." Gene: "Well, I hope he loves you."
Winter and Chico can trace Sam's bag. Claire and Sam take off from Coober Pedy. Bert teaches Chico to say, "Thanks, mate."
Flying over South Australia: images recapitulate Claire's dream of flying from opening sequence.
Claire and Sam kiss: flash in the sky: plane's engine cuts off: thunderclap.
Claire: "They did it -- they shot down the satellite." (Music: "Blood of Eden")
Back in Coober Pedy: all electrical systems have failed: "It's an EMP effect."
Claire: "It's the end of the world."
The powerless plane glides toward the ground."
Chico, back in Coober Pedy: "C'est le fin du monde, non?"
Plane touches down safely. Sam and Claire set off through the outback.
Voice Over: "The country... had already been abandoned..." Walking through a post-nuclear landscape, not knowing if this is actually the holocaust.
Claire and Sam meet up with David and Buzzer, two aboriginal men from the Mbantua settlement. Hand-cranked diesel trucks are the only means of mobility. Refugees fleeing fears of fallout. Gene, Winter, and Chico arrive. "Everybody's here."
At the Mbantua settlement. Gene: "I'd been trying to write a novel..." He begins again: "1999 was the year the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control..." Loop back to beginning of film.
Sam, Claire, and company arrive at Mbantua Cultural Center and Henry Farber's secret lab. Sam re-united with his mother, Edith (Eisner) Mbantua, and her skin-sister, Maisie Mbantua.
Edith: "Sometimes the best things happen at the worst moments."
Hand-painted sign: "ALL ARRIVALS CHECK RADIATION LEVELS" (Music: "Knocking on Death's Door").
Henry Farber: "I knew there was a pretty girl in it somewhere." The recording tapes from the brain-camera have somehow (impossibly!) survived the EMP effect.
Sam and Henry quarrel almost instantly. Sam (acidly): "Nice to see you, father." Henry: "I've become like my own father." Edith: "Obsessive man!"
Entering the lab: note aboriginal cave paintings on wall.
Gene finds an old manual typewriter in the Cultural Center. Introduction to lab personnel.
Edith to Henry: "I'd rather never see a single face than lose him again. His is the single face I wanted to see, and you didn't think of giving me that."
Henry: "Edith Eisner is tireless."
Lab paraphernalia -- computer core is sphere floating in water tank.
Attempt to transfer camera images into Edith's brain, using Sam as experimental subject. The original perceiver must re-create his experience so computer can compare electrochemical data. Sam fails. He and his father have bitter quarrel.
Sam: "You could have admitted you were wrong for once in your life!"
Claire: "This whole journey -- for nothing."
Christmas, 1999 passes without notice. Isolation and radio silence. No one knows if civilization still exists. Gene: "The experiment seemed of greater importance than the end of time itself."
Claire takes Sam's place in the experiment, with great success. "She's a natural!" Sam and Gene watch Claire make the breakthrough.
Edith: "Colors. Blue. Yellow. Red." The technological miracle is a matter of personal contact. Edith sees her long-lost relatives.
The story of Edith and Henry: fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s. She was 12 (blind since age 8), he was 14. "You followed some of our adventure: Berlin, Paris, Lisbon... and then America."
Bert the tracker arrives at the Mbantua settlement.
Gene's Voice Over: Edith's return to sight is a bittersweet gift, because her friends have all aged 50 years and the world is a darker, uglier place than she remembers it. But no one notices. "Her grief was only there for those with eyes to see it."
Claire worries about "possible side effects of this whole thing." Carl, Henry's programmer-assistant, cynically observes that Henry is obsessed, chasing a Nobel prize. There is more to the camera than just a prosthesis for the blind.
Carl: "It can take visual information straight from the brain. They can suck out our dreams and look at them like television."
Chico manages to pick up an L.A. radio station on December 31, 1999, "last day of the century" (actually not). "The world is still alive!"
Edith to Henry: "The world is not okay. You know the world is not okay." "Life ends. But I've seen, finally, after these years. This is our story, my darling. What a chase it has been. What a dance." (Music: "Days," reprise)
Edith dies. The women come in to wail. Henry and Peter cover themselves in ashes.
But Henry neglects the aboriginal custom of mourning; he returns to his work. Peter remonstrates with him. Henry: "I'm a white fellow, you know."
Gene: "They all went home, thinking the story was over." But it isn't. Henry presses on with his research. "This is Nobel prize matter!"
Peter explains the sacrilege of violating the Dreamings. The Mbantua abandon Henry. "He's trying to record his own dreams." Montages of dream-images. Sam joins the experiment. Claire: "Don't hurt him." Henry: "He's my son."
Juxtaposition: the "Dream Tap" program against Gene's typewriter tap-tapping.
Claire: "This is so beautiful."
Henry: "Wallpaper is beautiful. You're looking at the human soul singing to itself. To its own god."
Claire: "I don't know about god."
Henry: "The god within us. Look at it. It needs nothing."
Claire: "It needs everything."
Henry: "Nothing! Nothing!"
Claire: "We don't have the right..."
Claire records her dreams. Gene: "Who could have known that sleeping inside her was the propensity for addiction?"
Claire: "I want to see this again!"
Gene: "...waiting, watching, wanting... to see a dream."
The dream-addicts begin to dream about their dreams. Gene says they have come to "the island of dreams." They are "drowning in their own nocturnal imagery."
Claire's primal dream: "Why do you leave her alone?" Falling... time... loneliness... fear.
Gene rescues Claire, who has become inseparable from her hand-held monitor. The batteries fail, and Claire must go cold turkey.
Claire: "Make it work!"
Gene: "I can't, Claire. It's dead."
Claire: "I'm dead! My heart is dead!"
Gene: "I didn't know the cure for the disease of images. All I knew was how to write. But I believed in the magic and healing power of words, and of stories."
[Epilogue, in effect]
Two anonymous agents find Henry Farber in Australia and take him back to the U.S. Sam escapes them by fleeing into a maze of canyons, still addicted to the dream machine -- "lost in the labyrinth of his own soul."
Sam is cured by David Mbantua, who has him sleep between two aboriginal shamans. "They will take your dream." Sam awakens restored.
Claire discovers Gene's manuscript and begins to read it, with evident pleasure. Apparently reading the story is her cure.
Claire, on finishing. "But now -- what happens now?"
Gene: "Oh. That's for you to invent."
The book is called "A Dance Around the Planet." Gene: "I watched you dance."
Claire and Gene split up on the dock at Sydney.
Sam visits his father's grave. Henry died in 2001. Next shot is in space, of orbital station (note hommage to Kubrick and Clarke).
Claire has joined "Greenspace." "...watching the oceans for pollution crimes." She spends her 30th birthday in space. Happy birthday call to low Earth orbit.
(Music: Robbie Robertson, "Breaking the Rules of the Game")
Closing sequence: sunrise over the limb of the planet again, though this time the view is from the southern hemisphere.
Final music (over credits): U-2, "Until the End of the World."